Happy New Year! Welcome to the Heliosphere Newsletter.
This message is intended to kick things off. The newsletter will provide a weekly update on all things related to the heliosphere (e.g., sessions of interest, coordination among subgroups, new and important science topics, etc .. ).
I (Nathan Schwadron) am the editor of the newsletter and Mihir Desai and Eric Zirnstein are co-editors. Please send anything you would like to post or new members to be added to the list to myself, Eric or Mihir:
We will collect information and circulate in the weekly newsletter (at the beginning of each week). These newsletters will be archived on the following website:
Posts will be limited to ascii text. If people want to post anything complicated (i.e., papers in pdf, images, movies), you are welcome to put it on a website and send us the link. Links can easily be incorporated in the newsletter.
The emphasis of the session is on all aspects of the physics of the outer heliosphere and its interactions with the interstellar medium, particle acceleration at the sun and throughout the heliosphere and beyond, and understanding the nature of solar and interplanetary disturbances that impact our Earth’s environment. The session abstract is as follows:
Measurements over the last decade have revolutionized our understanding of (1) the heliosphere’s boundaries formed through the interactions with the interstellar neighborhood, (2) the acceleration and transport of solar and heliospheric suprathermal and energetic particle populations, and (3) the properties of the shocked solar wind, its embedded magnetic fields and convected interplanetary disturbances that impact geospace in the inner heliosphere. The US National Research Council’s 2012 Solar and Space Physics Decadal Survey recognized the critical need to urgently make progress in all three areas simultaneously, and recommended the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission as the next and highest priority science target for the Solar Terrestrial Probes mission line. This session solicits relevant observational results, especially from IBEX, Voyager, Cassini, New Horizons, ACE and STEREO, that provided these breakthroughs and related theoretical efforts making specific predictions and raising outstanding open questions for developing a more complete picture in all three science areas targeted by IMAP.
Please, consider that the abstract submission deadline is 13 January 2016.